XLibre? Instead of Wayland

General Help
1

Are you thinking about a Sonic DE edition, it is based of KDE, but with Xlibe?

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2

Welcome to the Forum!

There are no known Plans for this. And: it is a pretty new Project. It has to prove that it will have a Future.

3

Hi and Welcome.

Sadly, ZorinOS Core has only ever used a modified Gnome Desktop Environment, which means in the long-run, Wayland will be taken as the only way forward, and has had an impact on video-conferencing, desktop streaming (capturing the desktop), and disenfrabchisement of users who require accessibility functions.

There are quite a number of alternative distributions available to you that have either already embraced XLibre or intend to adopt it.

In respect of SonicDE, their site indicates which distributions can utilise it currently:

You could experiment by converting Zorin to KDE, but it might prove problematical in the long-run if updates break it:

4

Imagine a software project that’s been 15 years into making. A project that, after all this time, is still rather beta in quality. A project that can only do a portion of what its predecessor technology could and can do, and yet it is hailed as a “modern replacement”. A project that no one really wants to use, as it’s cumbersome, it breaks a lot of things, and doesn’t do what it ought to. A project that is now being forced onto the users through arbitrary decisions, because it’s the only way it could ever possibly be adopted. You would think this is something coming from a greedy big corpo like Apple or Google or Microsoft. Nope, it’s the open-source “darling” Wayland.

Wayland cannot do (or do well) tons of things: VNC server, remote desktop, SSH X forwarding, custom keyboard bindings, numerous accessibility options, legacy software, absolute desktop positioning, screen sharing and recording, CAD/EDA tools, performance, and then some. All of these are critical use cases, but they don’t seem to matter in the shiny happy new future that Wayland brings.

Ok then, a SonicDE edition might do well. It is based on KDE & that is a great DE. Here is a post on the Manjaro forum about it.

5

The link pointed to a Google Messages sign in page, not the Manjaro Forum page, so I removed it.

6

Hmmm... Try again, it should work now... https://forum.manjaro.org/t/x-org-server-new-security-vulnerabilities-discovered/188103/59

7

Well...

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8

I used the date of first of May which the failed link alluded to and that I think Brave A.I. search result via Mojeek came up with the goods:

"On May 1, 2026 , the X.Org project issued a major security advisory addressing nine new vulnerabilities in the X.Org X server and Xwayland . These issues, discovered primarily by Trend Micro's TrendAI Zero Day Initiative with one finding by Peter Hutterer of Red Hat, were fixed in xorg-server-21.1.23 and xwayland-24.1.12 .

The vulnerabilities included:

  • Font Alias Stack-based Buffer Overflow : Caused by a mismatch in maximum font name lengths.
  • XSYNC Use-After-Free : Occurring in miSyncDestroyFence() , FreeCounter() , and SyncChangeCounter() .
  • XKB Stack-based Buffer Overflows : In CheckKeyTypes() and _XkbSetMapChecks() .
  • GLX Out-of-Bounds Read/Write : In __glXDisp_ChangeDrawableAttributes() .
  • CreateSaverWindow Use-After-Free : Leading to information disclosure.
  • DRI2 Out-of-Bounds Write : In DRIGetBuffers /DRIGetBuffersWithFormat .

Note that while CVEs were requested, they had not been assigned at the time of this specific June 2026 disclosure. Earlier in 2026 (April), fixes for CVE-2026-33999 through CVE-2026-34003 were released in versions prior to 21.1.22 and 24.1.10.

AI-generated answer. Please verify critical facts."

But doesn't relate to Sonic DE.

For edification purposes:

Distributions that have already adopted XLibre:
PCLOS Debian
Artix

Distributions that intend to adopt:
Devuan
Q4OS

This is the extent of what I currently know, there may be other sensible distributions also offering this alongside Wayland.

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9

@ swarfendor437 Thnks, Mint has a Debian edition. So if Zorin switched to that after they added XLibe,

10

I somehow can't see Zorin ever changing to Debian unless Ubuntu and Gnome make it too hard for them to tweak it.

I don't use Zorin at all these days. My daily driver is PCLOS Debian, no systemd and running KDE Plasma.

11

I wouldn't underestimate another upcoming Thing: AI Integration in Ubuntu.

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12

Definitely no to that friend! :wink:

13

Well, Ubuntu will bring it. We will see what the Zorin Dev's will do with it. That isn't a Topic for now or Zorin 19 but then for Zorin 20.

14

Yes, everyone wants AI it seems, but Mint has a Debean edition. They want something to fall back to if Ubuntu gets stupid. Mint is a good user freindly distro. Be no issue for Zorin to switch to that as a base (IMO)

15

I believe, then they would switch directly to Debian and not to LMDE.

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16

The good thing about LMDE is that you can install other DE's, wheras with the main version with Cinnamon prevents you from doing it. So Debian would be a better move.

17

Well... it makes me smile a little that someone wakes up in the morning with an idea and demands its implementation🙂

If you use Zorin, you'll have to accept Wayland; otherwise, change your distro.

The missing features you mentioned seem to me to be already integrated into GNOME. Sure, some things can't be done, like intercepting keystrokes from any application, but think about how insecure that is. Wayland is inherently more secure, and obviously faster.

18

Just incase, like I told the fure about Mint.

19

Ah, the Change of their Release Cycle. Well, they did it for better Prepapration and Work on it. I wouldn't cook that up too much. When they want to take more Time to program and create their Stuff they should have it. And when that helps, why not. It isn't so that the current Version would lost the Support.

20

In the one example you gave, yes. But inherently more secure than X11? Not at all.

The problem with security in Wayland is that X11 uses a server. This is Waylands selling point: That it does not have a middle-man server.
But that server is x11's security selling point and why the security offered in Wayland is entirely dependent on peripheral examples:
Wayland links direct communication with the Kernel and the Display, with no server and nothing in between to buffer that. Hack that, and you get access to the Entire System. Everything.
And since there is no server, this means that you cannot patch it. Any exploit patch must rewrite Wayland itself.

This is the major thorn in Wayland's paw and their management of this is simply to run X11 in the background to add the security - And it does not tell you.

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